How To Break And Put Yourself Back Together
by Matt Licata
It’s okay to be sad, and to allow your heart to break. To fall to the ground and bear witness to the dissolution of a vision of the way things were going to turn out.
Rather than spin away from the death as if it were a defeat, the invitation is to travel inside it. Within the core of the heartbreak, there are jewels and a golden bridge that connects you with others. Now is the time to recommit to what is most important and to remember why you have come.
It’s okay to fall apart, and in this to see if you were ever “together” to begin with. What you are is the vast, majestic field in which “together” and “apart” dance as lovers, revealing to you that the path of the heart is endless. And needs you now more than ever.
It’s ok to break. It’s ok to fall to the ground.
Love is Formless
You never know what form love will choose to take in the future, for there is no love in the future. Love is only now. You will never be able to resolve or pin down the movement of love, as it is infinitely creative and at all times unfolding into greater wholeness and integration.
If you become too fused with a specific form you believe you need love to take, your heart will break when love obliterates that form for something new, which it always will. For this is the gift of form. This dissolving and reorganization is a special kind of grace that the mind cannot know. But the heart knows. The body knows.
Our preconceptions of love are so often obliterated, until we learn that they have no single form.
You are Love
Before you seek to “heal” your heartbreak, turn to your heart and ask if it truly wishes to be mended. For this breaking is sacred and is the activity of a special envoy of love, sent from the unseen to dissolve old dreams, so that new forms may emerge. Ones that will be beyond imagination.
Be grateful for the forms of love while they appear, but allow them their own organic process of death and rebirth. Seek refuge, not in love’s forms, but in the field of love itself, that which never comes and goes. For this is what you are.
Today may not be the day where answers will come, but to let your heart break open to the vastness of the question. Trust in the fires of disintegration.Maybe there was an idea that as you awakened the spectrum would narrow. That you would feel less. Maybe care less. That your sensitivity, your vulnerability, the rawness; that these would dissolve into some state of invincibility. That somehow you would transcend the erupting reality where somebody could come in at any moment and make you feel vulnerable again.
A broken heart is an opportunity for new forms of love to emerge.
Light in the Darkness
But love is always asking us to feel more; to meet and touch and infuse the full range of the spectrum. It asks us to use whatever comes our way as a sacred (yet often wrathful) ally, as we are crafted into a more luminous vessel for love to come alive.
As the veil parts and your perception is cleansed, what remains is unknown. Somehow this is both exhilarating and terrifying at the same time. We are in the realm of pure creativity, which will never, ever conform to our hopes, fears, preferences, and dreams.
Something new is being born inside you, but something else has fallen away. An old dream, an outdated vision, a second-hand invitation. While it is uncertain, a bit unstable, shaky, chaotic, and groundless in the womb of now, a light shines out of the darkness, arriving with a fierce call.
keep your eyes open. Not just your ordinary eyes, but the pure vision that sees out of the heart.
Being Truly Alive
This summons is rippling with the new, with an unprecedented sort of compassion, and is of the nature of full-spectrum aliveness. For love is ready at all times to make equal use of the energies of creation, preservation, and even destruction to seed the mandala around you. Everything that is partial will be recycled and re-integrated into the wholeness, but often in ways that are bewildering to a mind longing to return to the known.
While it may be terrifying and disorienting to the density of the mind and what has come before, the creativity of the new is overwhelming and outrageous. Trust in the fires of disintegration. For everything that is less than whole must be burned away, and out of the ashes of the unknown love will emerge in the most astonishing ways.
Stay close and keep your eyes open. Not just your ordinary eyes, but the pure vision that sees out of the heart.
Bio Matt Licata, PhD is a psychotherapist in Boulder, Colorado, who works with individuals and groups worldwide. He is Director of Professional Studies for multi-media publishing company Sounds True, and is involved with the dialogue between Western/ developmental, and contemplative/ mindfulness-based approaches to healing and spiritual transformation.
